Busting Out All Over

In his native England, Playwright-Actor-Director Peter Alexander Ustinov did so little TV that one critic mourned: "Genius is going to waste. That multitalented marvel, that compendium of comedy, has no sense of his duty to mankind--especially the part that watches TV." Luckily for viewers across the Atlantic, peripatetic Peter Ustinov is busting out all over U.S. television.

This season the portly (229 lbs.), shaggy droll with the twinkling squint has hurdled the gulf from Omnibus to The $64,000 Challenge, popped up on What's My Line?, The Last Word, and six memorable sessions of the Jack Paar Show. Last week, in his second Omnibus show, he won hosannas for directing and starring in a televersion of his own satiric tragedy, Moment of Truth, playing a Petain-like elder statesman with overtones of King Lear.

Wunderkind. While getting ready for his appearance this week on the Steve Allen Show, Ustinov (pronounced Youstinov) did a telecast for the Canadian Broadcasting Co., previewed a TV film on disarmament that he narrated for the U.N., squeezed in three interviews, a picture sitting, a lecture, a testimonial dinner, and a spot of home life in his East Side Manhattan apartment with his wife, Canadian Actress Suzanne Cloutier, and their two children. In between, he also cavorted through eight performances of his Ustinov-written Broadway comedy, Romanoff and Juliet, which was sagging at the box office when its run was bolstered by his spectacular TV performance as Dr. Samuel Johnson (TIME. Dec. 30).

At 36, Ustinov is a sort of Orson Welles rolled into one. He has 13 produced plays to his credit, two of which have reached Broadway (the first: The Love of Four Colonels), has acted in dozens of plays and movies, directed half a dozen more. A brilliant raconteur, ad-libber and dialectician, he speaks French, German. Italian and Spanish (plus devastatingly accurate American of several regions), gives funny, plausible imitations of languages he does not speak, e.g., Russian with a Japanese accent, can make noises like a talking dog. a bugle, a violin, flute, bassoon or harpsichord. He is halfway through the script of a novel. And he has been doing this sort of thing for half of his life. Says Ustinov: "This talk of Wunderkind gets more intense as I grow older and the white hairs crop out in my beard."

Witty Sting. Wunderkind Ustinov was born in London, a descendant of a titled Russian who was exiled in 1868. (Peter's grandmother owned the largest caviar fishery in czarist Russia.) His father, a German citizen, was a journalist, spent 14 years as press attache at the German embassy in London. Peter drifted out of school in his teens and into London cabarets, where his mocking monologues kidded diplomats and aristocrats, prima donnas and generals. At an irreverent 18, he enchanted Londoners by mimicking--in ersatz Swahili--an addled bishop of the Church of England who had stayed too long in Africa. He was 21 when his first play (House of Regrets) was produced. On a TV show in London three years ago, Ustinov's raucous imitation of musicians, U.S. politicians and various automobiles (a passionate hobby) so fascinated the BBC program director that the 15-minute show was expanded to 30 minutes on the spot. It was on a BBC panel show that Ustinov gave first utterance to the comic title for a traveling vaudeville team, "Bulge and Khrush." Like everything else, TV itself has felt his witty sting. Sample: "Crusty old politicians are now told how to put things across on TV. And the more charming they are, the less you believe ... I still remember Macmillan on TV last year watching the camera lens as if it were a cobra and appealing to the nation for calm, his face frozen with terror."

In the U.S., which knows him in the beard that he grew for his current stage role, Visitor Ustinov is most familiar as wit and mimic in his appearances on the Jack Paar Show, but he complains: "All those interruptions [for commercials] while you sit there trying to be Voltaire--Voltaire wouldn't stand for it." He is particularly fascinated by U.S. giveaways, "where they meter the suffering that people have had, and the one with the saddest life gets the refrigerator. It's like watching a medieval morality play with all the vices paraded before you--avarice, for instance." As for The $64,000 Challenge, on which he flunked out at the $8,000 level when he failed to identify the Shalamar Gardens, he recalls: "The air conditioning in my booth broke down, and I came out, my ears popping, gasping for breath. I was preceded by a ten-year-old boy who used up all the air spelling very long words."

For working up so much creative lather with such a versatile hand, Ustinov is "embarrassed to say how much" he earns. His first love is the theater, especially playwriting. Though London critics have called him a master of stagecraft with a Shavian wit, Ustinov is keenly aware of their criticism that he "wins his battles but loses his campaigns." He refuses to add to his work load by getting into TV to stay. Says he with a furtive smile: "I don't want to do more and give less quality. It wouldn't be fair to the audience." Meantime he is the season's most welcome new sight on the U.S. home screen.

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